In typical cyber-physical systems, various sensors are deployed in order to sense physical parameters including temperature, pressure, humidity, energy consumption, and the like. These sensors form one of the significant elements of the cyber physical systems. These sensors are of distinct types and are capable of generating heterogeneous data. The heterogeneous data may be captured and stored in a data store for future use. For example, the data stored in the data store may be utilized in order to provide various data analytic services.
However, the data captured may not be helpful in providing additional inferences, insights, and context specific information about the plurality of sensors. This is because, the data captured is indicative of values sensed from the sensors and hence may not be beneficial in understanding and deriving contextual information related to the sensors. There may be several sensors available in sensor domain having similar functionalities, similar capabilities, and similar features. Since the data store stores mere data values and is not capable to capture the additional contextual information associated to the sensors, it becomes a challenge to identify most appropriate sensor among several other sensors and to discover their services that satisfies application and use case requirements of a cyber physical system.
Further, it has been observed that the capabilities, the features, and the functionalities associated with the sensors may be modified over a period of time due to proliferation of sensor technologies. In such scenario, if the data store storing the data is not updated with the recent information pertaining to newer capabilities, features, and functionalities related to the sensors, the sensor selected by the user may not be fruitful. Further, it has been observed that while searching a sensor, the user may query the data store with one or more generic terms or related terms closely related to the information present in the data store. Since, one or more generic terms or the related terms does not match with the information present in the data store, there is a challenge of retrieving sensor information from the data store against such queries, and hence such queries may remain unresolved.